


The Many Loves of Zaveid

by ImJustNutty



Series: Things That Go Bump In Your Sleep [3]
Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: F/M, Gen, Shocking I know, Zaveid-centric fic, background Lailah/Zaveid, massive backstory speculation, no actual spoilers wow amazing, romance isn't everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 10:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5493923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImJustNutty/pseuds/ImJustNutty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zaveid defines the periods of his life by the predominant woman of the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Many Loves of Zaveid

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Okay, yes I know that this doesn't technically happen While Sorey Sleeps but it happens after Waltz of Warm Winds and plausibly right before When Mikleo and Edna Were Dating. 
> 
> 2) So much backstory speculation going on that should the Zestiria anime expand on Zaveid's life, this fic should honestly be deleted asdfghjk 
> 
> 3) I apologise for all grammatical errors in advance once again because I'm a disgrace who doesn't proofread.

Zaveid defines the milestones in his life by the women in his life at the time.

He knows that some would consider it ridiculous or naïve to measure one’s life by the many romances, but he doesn’t care. He’s lived a long time, and frankly age doesn’t matter when you’ve lived for over a thousand years. What’s three hundred compared to four hundred, when there have been another six hundred years after? He’s looked the same for almost the whole time.

Physical maturity means nothing, but his outlook on life and psychological maturity do.

He’s always been interested in women—that hasn’t changed. But the kind of women he eventually chases, and the kind that notice him; ah, now that has changed.

The first one was Viola, a black-haired wind seraph, who led a group of mostly wind seraphs who acted as a mercenary group. She wore her eyeliner black, winged sharp enough that it threatened to pierce your own eyes if you stared for too long. She did, in fact, also have daggers that _would_ pierce you if you stared for too long, which was how Zaveid found himself pinned against a wall in a crowded market, knife to his throat and pendulum lying useless in the sand five metres away. Somehow, he was drawn to the feeling of the unattainable woman, the one female more likely to want to use him as a footstool than to cling to him for help in a dire situation. His persistence won him a place amongst them, and his youth and good looks earned him a place in her bed.

He discovered that much like her knives, makeup and smile, Viola’s teeth were also very sharp, and they left red marks all over his neck.

From her, he learned that death was a type of release. Two events taught him this, during a war that happened when he was barely a few decades old. Firstly, one of her mercenaries turned into a hellion. He had been a wind seraph, a young one. Lost in the world of mortals and unable to find his place, he tried to find fulfilment in the mercenary group, but senseless killing wore on him.

Viola’s slew him herself, at a time when malevolence was not fully understood, and the malevolence went into her own soul instead. Its effects weren’t immediate, and she withstood it for a full day. The night she killed the hellion, she drew more blood from Zaveid that night with her teeth and nails, and urged him on harder and faster as though that would scrub the guilt from herself.

The next day, the war continued, and in the middle of the battlefield stained with blood from humans and seraphim alike, a dragon appeared. It was accompanied by black clouds, and the sky turned dark and starless.

Like Viola’s knives, her claws were sharp. Zaveid barely fled with his life, along with some of the other mercenaries, only to be captured by enterprising slavers who rounded up the deserters from both sides of the armies. Seraphim slaves made for especially good coin at the time, and they were kept under constant watch. And that was the second event that made him learn his lesson; it took only about two weeks before Zaveid was the only seraph left from that mercenary group. The rest ended their lives in various ways.

The woman of this portion of Zaveid’s life was called Bitch. He honestly couldn’t remember her real name, but he would only remember her as the Bitch. She was the slave trader who kept the especially valuable slaves. The worst part of her was that she was a seraph, like him, who chose to dabble in the trade of her own brothers and sisters for personal profit. And so, even if it prolonged his own suffering, he made himself literally unsellable. When he was paraded on the platforms for prospective buyers to view, he acted the fool, he spat in their faces, he acted as though he was deathly ill—so many methods. His fellow prisoners would watch passively, and they would get sold to masters more forgiving, or perhaps worse. Who knew? All Zaveid knew was that he dampened the Bitch’s profit margins, and he would be punished for his efforts. He was branded with hot irons that marked him as a slave. Most slaves got a mark on their wrists or on their necks. Zaveid wore his as prominent stripes across the shoulder, chest and arms-- like war paint that would never be washed away.

Death might have been a means of escape, but Zaveid also learned that the real bad ones got their comeuppance eventually. He wished he had been conscious to witness it, truly he did. But all he knew was that he had been beaten so badly he was close to death, until a shadow dark as night fell over them with a roar that shook the earth. He was rescued by the people of a nearby village, who told him wonderful tales of a black dragon that rained fire on the slavers as they passed through the mountain gorge.

The next woman was a little girl, whose name was Siegfried. She was the human daughter of a blacksmith that he lived with after his rescue. For the first few weeks he was there, recovering from exhaustion and general ill health, she was terrified of him. Eventually she warmed up to him, and followed him everywhere.

One day, Zaveid was helping the blacksmith with some chore or another. It might have been chopping wood. Still weak, he managed to injure his arm. The blacksmith’s wife made him take off his shirt so she could tend to his wounds, and when he did, little Siegfried burst into tears.

“Who did those to you?” she kept asking, and she wouldn’t stop crying. Her mother knew what they were, and told her gently that they were done by bad people who wouldn’t do it anymore to other people because they were dead. The answer was not enough to soothe little Siegfried. After Zaveid’s wound was wrapped up he was confined to his bed in the guest bedroom again, and for the first time in living memory he cried that night.

The next day he asked the blacksmith if he knew anyone who could do tattoos. As a matter of fact, the blacksmith himself did it, along with piercings and other relevant arts that involved sharp metal. Zaveid promised himself as free labour for the blacksmith for as long as he needed, in exchange for two things: a specific pattern of white tattoos, and a revolver pistol.

Siegfried watched as the burn scars were covered with white tattoos, and when her father was done with his work she gave an approving nod. Zaveid made to put on his shirt, but she put her small hand over his.

“Siegfried?”

“It’s nice,” she said, rather insistently.

“Dearest, Mister Zaveid here will get cold if he doesn’t put on his shirt. Spare a thought for the poor man,” her father said, but Zaveid smiled.

“Well, I’ve hardly been the type to refuse a little lady such a request.”

One might question the soundness of allowing a young girl grow up with a perpetually shirtless man around the house, but everyone in the village knew that Zaveid worked hard and helped the blacksmith’s family with many chores. Siegfried followed him, and many joked that she was closer to him than Zaveid’s own shadow. When he worked for long hours, she would bring him food and water (even though he didn’t really need it), and she would sit there and watch him for hours. He was like the adopted son and dearest older brother, except he didn’t need food or sleep.

It was seven years before Zaveid found the person he was looking for, one who could properly equip him with the weapon he needed to repay someone. He packed his bags, assuring Siegfried that he would return, and ventured into the woods.

Honestly, Zaveid doesn’t know if that was really Maotelus he met in that dilapidated hut all those years ago. He tried to look for that hut in the middle of the woods a while ago, but time changes everything. The forest didn’t even exist in that region of the continent anymore. But when he returned to the village, his revolver pistol came with a set of special bullets.

But he was too late.

He had left the village because he wanted to repay Viola for what he’d learned from her, and also because she had saved his life. But she was greedy, and seven years was too long to wait. She returned, and took everyone in that village as her due.

Zaveid remembered that he fell to his knees in front of the burning ruins where the blacksmith’s house once stood, barely registering the heat that licked at him mockingly. The black dragon roared her triumph, demanding that he acknowledge it.

Two things came out of that day. The revolver guns with the bullets that shielded him from malevolence worked. That was good. It was also the day that he named the gun Siegfried.

He is hesitant to consider that “setting Viola free” was an achievement. While Zaveid likes to tell people that death is a form of salvation, he tries to ignore the moral conundrums it generates when it involves his own friends. That’s how he copes.

It could be argued that the woman of his life for the next two hundred years was Siegfried the gun, as he took it upon himself to hunt down hellions. In all honesty, Siegfried was his wife, and alcohol was his mistress. Years of lost wandering, trying to find his own path. There weren’t that many hellions in those days, so his life wasn’t too busy. He wooed girls who were swayed by his charms and apparent badassery, all the while despising both himself and them. He took up casual mercenary jobs, hunting contracts and hellion exterminating requests.

There was one particularly interesting one, where a flustered fire seraph burst into the inn, panting with exhaustion. Zaveid regarded her passively over the rim of his tenth tankard of ale as the innkeeper rushed to her, and the seraph gestured wildly as she explained that she had brought a gravely injured man on the back of a horse outside who needed help, and that the innkeeper _had_ to help because he was the Shepherd.

Zaveid blames the alcohol till today, for making him behave like the asshole he was that day. He slammed down his tankard and swaggered over to her. His brain tries to forget what exactly was said, but it was something along the lines of “what’s the big deal about a Shepherd”, “human male lovers are _so_ last millennia” and probably something else implying that he would make a better bed mate. In any case, it ended with her ignoring him completely, the Shepherd having a proper place in bed, and Zaveid vomiting his guts out somewhere behind the stables.

Good ol’ days.

He found some purpose when he found a group of seraphim who prided themselves on having seen the world, on spending their long lifespans documenting the world as it passed from age to age. Zaveid deemed that a better use of time compared to wasting away in watering holes across the continent, and followed them.

There he found his fourth woman, whose name was Dahlia. In contrast to Viola, she was pale and gentle, quiet and not forceful in the least. She was a delicate water seraph, with more than enough power to handle herself. But she had an air of exhaustion, a tiredness that came with one who had seen what life had to offer, and she did not like it.

Zaveid found in her a kindred soul, and they became close friends. He, however, would not touch her, when he saw how she seemed to distance herself from him when he flirted with her, even when it was but playful banter. He never knew why, but eventually he stopped. There were plenty of other females in their group who played along, and Dahlia didn’t object to them sharing his bed.

He spent a long time travelling with them, and eventually he parted ways with them to join another group of travelling mercenaries, this time a human group. Dahlia followed him, becoming the group’s chief healer. Despite the violence they met, Dahlia strangely seemed to thrive with her newfound purpose of restoring the injured members of their party. When wanderlust hit Zaveid again and urged him to move on, Dahlia told him to leave her behind with them. He pleaded with her to go with him, but she would not. She had found purpose after too long, and she wanted to keep to it. It took him a while to accept it, but eventually he did. Before he left, she told him one thing.

“You have your duty to your friends to give them their salvation when they are no longer themselves. You heal souls, and I will heal bodies.”

He had been upset because he thought he lost a friend who felt his own lack of purpose in life, but in that moment he looked into her pale blue eyes and saw that they had in fact found purpose somewhere along the way. If anything, Zaveid had found his earlier, even if Dahlia was the one who’d figured that out before him.

For the first time in almost three hundred years, Zaveid took out Siegfried. He disassembled it, cleaned the barrel out, oiled the appropriate moving parts, and tested it out with a normal bullet. It shouldn’t have been possible for a revolver pistol to work that well after so long, but it did, and part of him would always believe that Siegfried’s namesake made sure of it.

Zaveid and Siegfried travelled the world on their own for a while after that, joining groups of travellers whenever they fancied, or sometimes individual travellers. Most of the time, Zaveid and Siegfried went alone. When Zaveid went out to search for his old friends who’d turned hellion, he would go alone, with only Siegfried for company. It was the only company he needed on those journeys.

Zaveid soon stopped travelling with human explorers. At first there was a novelty in accompanying groups where only one or two people could see him, but as the malevolence in the world grew thicker and more cloying, it was almost as if he existed entirely in a different realm. Soon, he travelled either alone or with one other seraph.

Eizen was one of those single travellers he’d met along those journeys, but Eizen was a young earth seraph who had the misfortune of being male. Still, Zaveid would be lying if he said Eizen wasn’t the reason for the next set of events in his life. It didn’t take long for Eizen to learn about Zaveid’s personal belief of death as a salvation, and as though Eizen already knew of some dormant darkness within him, he swore Zaveid to save him, should he turn hellion.

And then there was the time Zaveid remembered his promise, and went to the mountain where he remembered Eizen said he lived. It didn’t take long before the dragon saw him, and even shorter before he got flung off the summit and into the river far below.

Back to square one.

When he recovered enough to walk, he managed the hike to the base of Rayfalke Spiritcrest, only to bump into yet another Shepherd and a very familiar looking fire seraph. Now, if anything about Eizen stood out to Zaveid, it was that he had been a ridiculously powerful earth seraph. As a dragon, he was definitely worse, without any inhibitions.

And so he stepped in, though at the time he hadn’t thought much of it.

Zaveid only knew that it was the start of a new age when he relinquished his first true love, Siegfried, to Sorey. He had only felt the slightest tinge of hesitation, but he felt as though the original Siegfried would have understood.

After that, as they say, the rest was history.

 

 

Zaveid liked to think that, as he lay in bed rubbing circles on the base of Lailah’s spine as she nuzzled against his neck in post-coital afterglow, defining this section of his life with Lailah who he’d once gravely insulted many centuries ago was probably concrete evidence that he’d matured significantly over his life.

“Really, I think that’s more a sign of _my_ maturity,” muttered Lailah, as she smacked Zaveid’s hip lightly. Zaveid was beginning to think that his unconscious speaking aloud of his inner thoughts might be a sign of his physical maturity.

“I have to agree whole-heartedly, my love. Now please be quiet. We’ve got to wake up early tomorrow to meet Sorey and Mikleo.”

He found another way of salvation with his travels with the Shepherd, and most importantly, he found yet another purpose in his life. He stopped bringing death to old friends, and instead strove for bringing life back to the very continent. Death was no longer his goal. Siegfried’s purpose had evolved, and he felt that finally he could make it up to that little girl from so long ago for her love to him.

“Someday you must tell me about Siegfried,” Lailah mumbled sleepily.

“I look forward ta doing that,” he replied, with a smile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
